~ Day by day with RA …

Viruses 2, Carla 0

If you’ve been keeping score along with me, you know I haven’t been faring too well lately. In the latest of the ongoing saga, I’ve been hit by two viruses — or rather I’ve been hit by one, my computer has been hit by the other.

I did recover fully and without incident from the freakish and scary pleurisy episode, but I apparently picked up some kind of cold virus while I was in the ER, because 36 hours later it hit me (and is still hitting me even as we speak). It’s a bit concerning since I’m on Enbrel and you have to be cautious about those sorts of things. Hopefully I’ll be over it in a couple of days, but if not, I see my rheumatologist the morning I’m supposed to take my next Enbrel injection and she can advise me whether I should take it or not.

The other virus hit my poor little laptop. It’s my 3-lb. travel laptop whose sole function is to go places with me, check emails and be used for Magic Jack phone calls back to the U.S. Since we leave for Jamaica next week, I had started the ritual of powering up his batteries and downloading all the latest updates from Windows, Office, and his anti-virus software. At one point when I went to reboot him, he didn’t come back up. And apparently there is no easy fix for the malware that infected him. The computer did come with a “start from zero” routine that reset everything back to the factory fresh status, so that’s what I did. Unfortunately, the computer is a few years old and at last count, I had installed about 70 Windows updates. So while I laid around feeling miserable with my cold virus, I worked on helping my baby laptop get over his.

We’re still working on both of them. Based on where we are, I figure I have another 40 or so updates to go on the computer and probably 3-4 days of misery with the cold. With everything that’s going on with my health issues, I wish there were a way to reset me to my factory settings as well.